ABSTRACT
Himachal Pradesh is well acclaimed for its educational development in a short span compared to Kerala. The momentum for education started in 1983 with literacy campaigns and a massive school building programme. Further, in 1997, the Government of Himachal Pradesh passed the Compulsory Education Act (Act No. 2 of 1998), much before the RTE Act of 2009 at national level. Even more significant has been the reduction in dropout ratio, very few out-of-school children, especially among girls and within that in SC/ST group. Almost every child in 6–14 age group, regardless of sex or caste, is enrolled in school. This is indeed the most significant success story of educational achievement in Himachal Pradesh during late 1990s (PROBE 1999; GoHP 2002; Dreze and Sen 2002; etc.). The state has committed high levels of investment in provisioning elementary education in sparsely inhabited areas such as Lahaul and Spiti where formal schools are functioning for extremely small numbers of children. Quite expectedly given the terrain, density of population and the pattern of habitations, the teacher–pupil ratio in the state is one of the best (1:16) in the country in 2009–10 (DISE: Himachal Pradesh 2010). For example, in districts like Lahaul and Spiti, on an average there are only four students per teacher. Achieving this has clearly been a high cost endeavour for the hilly state. On the other hand, this indicates the non-financial viability of such low PTR schools. Unit cost of provisioning of elementary education is quite high in a hilly state which has the highest per-student public expenditure on elementary education, around Rs. 21,177 in 2010–11 as against the national average of Rs. 9,766. Even before SSA, Himachal Pradesh had made impressive progress in elementary education. Now the concern is about ensuring quality and sustaining the achievements.
